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Holidays in Santa Cruz – 2.

After a restful day, I went cycling again. This time I wanted to ride to the north along the eastern coast of the island, then turn to the west, and climb the highest peak of La Palma from the northwestern direction. I knew it would be hard (with more than 120 km and three and a half kilometer of elevation gain, on the steepest roads of the island), but we need challenges in life :) I had my breakfast sitting at the open window (that’s something I will miss in Leuven, but finally I will have my chocolate, fries, and beer ;D) and watching the sunrise over the calm see towards the island of Tenerife. I had some difficulties inserting my contact lenses (everything is great about lenses, but I don’t like this part), so it was already half past 9 by the time I managed to leave the apartment.

The first 60.9 km was like a roller-coaster ride, with amazing views to the see, the steep cliffs and narrow valleys. In general, there were three longer climbs before the real thing started, but if you are interested in the details, click here to see the GPS data of the day. Words are not enough to describe the beauty of the island, I have seen the paradise here. Really, there were times, when I could see a rainbow in the distance as there were small showers hanging over the see, and imagine the whole scene over green slopes and curvy mountain roads…

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The road usually went around the ridges, but sometimes there were tunnels also. I knew this would happen, so I put my rear light on already at the beginning, and just turned it on when I saw a tunnel approaching. But at the last and longest one, I went in as usual, but then it turned out that there is absolutely no lighting inside, and as the end was not visible from the first hundreds of meters, it became completely dark very soon. Luckily, for safety reasons, I also put my headlamp in my backpack, so I stopped in the darkness, and put it on… But it was really shocking to roll in with 40 km/h and then realize that the road disappears in the darkness :D There were also some sections, where one lane was closed due to road-works, and the traffic was controlled by traffic-lights, so I had to wait sometimes several minutes to get a green sign (and I usually managed to pass the section before the other direction got the green).

So after a bit more than 60 km and an elevation gain of two kilometers, I arrived to the start of the climb at an elevation of 940 meter ASL. From here, it took 19.4 km to climb 1485 meter to the Roque de los Muchachos, which gives an average slope steepness of 7.7%, making this the most difficult climb I ever had (maybe even without taking into account the two kilometers of elevation gain already in my legs at the beginning of the big climb). The first kilometers were quite OK till the point where I had to turn to the TF-4 road from the TF-1 (which I was following from Santa Cruz), then came the brutal section. Really, it did hurt. In 1.8 km I rode up 200 meters, which translates to an average steepness of 11.1%, and also a nice amount of lactate in your legs ;) But this is only the average, there was a curve-combination (looking down you could see three two more “levels” of the road below the one you were riding on), where it went up to 15% for quite a long section. (There were two buses coming down, and the drivers were waving and smiling when they saw me – but this was the case with most of the cars I met on the way up, which felt really good.) Of course the forest and the scenery was amazing, the sky was deep blue (with no clouds on this side of the mountain), but I was really tired to take pictures, I think I just wanted to concentrate on the climb itself.

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Halfway up the mountain, I really got fed up with the energy bars and gels (which I ate ate every stop after every 250 m of elevation gain), so I will be happy not to eat them for a while now, as the outdoor cycling season is probably over for this year (based on the temperatures I have seen for Belgium). Now – not like two days before – I arrived to the area of the Observatory in sunshine, so there was no need of warmer clothes before reaching the summit. I was extremely happy when I finally arrived at the peak, and I don’t want to deny that it felt very good that quite a few people gave their congratulations when they saw me :) Quickly I asked for a photo, then (after all these formalities) I sat down and took a bit of a rest. (But first I put on the knee and arm warmers, the wind west and the neck warmer, because the wind was cold.)

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I already knew the way down from two days earlier, but it was still a challenge with the numerous steep curves. Luckily the road was less wet now (though it was still not cloudless on this side of the mountain), and as I did not receive another tropical rain-shower as a present from mother nature this time, I hade really nice views after I came out of the cloud layer. It was a really well spent day.

After taking a shower, I slept a bit (yeah, I was tired as hell) before I went for my usual dinner. You coud really tell that the waiter was really happy to see me again – as I had my dinner at the same small pizzeria every evening (I already had my favorite spot). They served great pizza (though not the best I ever had, but close to it), and I liked the atmosphere of the place. Moreover, I usually payed only 10 € for everything with tip included, which is at least 50% more in Leuven. But this was also true for the supermarket, I was always surprised how cheep my purchases were.

This morning (after the usual breakfast wit the view to the sunrise over the sea… – boring :D) I packed in everything (now I am a really professional bike disassembler and packer), the took the taxi to the airport, and now I am flying over Portugal on the way to Madrid. Hopefully everything will be fine and I (and also my luggage) will arrive around 10 PM to Brussels, so I might be in Leuven still before midnight. If I manage to post this post then you know I am fine (and if not, then this sentence does not make any sense, but hope for the best :D).

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Holidays in Santa Cruz – 1.

On the 20th I finally took the taxi and left the mountaintop behind. I asked for a big cab at the reception (because of my bike box) of the Observatory, but I did not expect a mini van :D The driver was very nice, we talked about cycling almost all the way down. I went directly to my apartment (La Fuente), where I got the keys, but as I had to wait till noon before I could move in, I decided to go for a short walk in the city.

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Santa Cruz de La Palma is really nice, I am not a huge fan of the Spanish (or Latin) style, but these small streets with the wooden balconies are lovely. As the Queen Elizabeth was in town (I mean, in the port), the old part of the city was flooded by mostly old European and Japanese tourists… In theory, it was only 26°C (in the shadow of course), but after the climate of the Observatory (at 2150-2350 m ASL), I was really sweating like a horse down at sea level. I had lunch at the new port building on the terrace of a nice modern pizzeria (where all the pizzas were named after old Hollywood movies), then I walked back to the La Fuente. My apartment is on the 4th floor, which has pros and cons. First of all, I have a view to the sea, and the sunrise (which is just awesome), but I had to carry up the 32 kg bike box in the narrow staircase, which was quite a difficult job… Anyway, it has a very good price/quality ratio.

On Thursday morning I packed my arm and knee warmers, a wind west, and a cap into my small backpack, I filled its hydration pack and two bottles with Isostar, and after putting on some sunscreen I went out to climb the highest peak of the world’s steepest island. By bike, from sea level. (You can see the details of the ride here.)

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When I left Santa Cruz, the Sun was very strong, so I started to worry a bit that leaving the rest of the sunscreen at the apartment might turn out to be not my best idea ever, but then I entered the cloud layer at around 800 m ASL, and I spent almost all the rest of the ride in there… Around 400 m ASL small dogs started to follow me while barking loud just 10-20 cm from my feet, but luckily it was still a bit too early for lunch :) (Normally dogs are not a big deal, as I can go faster than them, but not uphills on a 8% slope…) This was a much harder climb than the on on Tenerife – almost as long, but significantly steeper. It consists of three parts: 33.62 km @ 6.8% from 5 m to 2285 m, then 5.20 km slight up and downs (average @ -2.7%), and finally 3.67 km @ 7.2% from 2147 m to 2411 m (with sections as steep as 11% at the last hundreds of meters – which really did hurt). I saw the Sun again at ~2200 ASL meter for a couple of minutes while I was pedaling up through the area of the Observatory, but that’s all – the peak (Roque de Los Muchachos) was in the clouds again already by the time I arrived. It took me almost 3 hours and 20 minutes to ride from sea level to the top of La Palma.

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Before I started the descent I put the arm and knee warmers on, plus the cap under the helmet, because the weather was quite chilly up there. Unfortunately it did not improve on the way down, but it started to be quite wet at around 1200 m ASL – which gave me a bit of a trouble in one of the many corners, but my experience (unclipping the SPD shoes when realizing that breaking is not effective enough for such a steep curve) saved the day for me :) To put the icing on the cake, it started to rain cats and dogs (with really big, but luckily quite warm drops) at around 400 m ASL, which lasted till I reached sea level. The road turned into a river almost immediately, so I had to be extremely careful, because 180° turns on flowing water are not that easy. I got completely soaked, I have never been so wet on the bike before. As soon as I arrived home (and took a shower) I put my cycling shoes out into the window, and it was still a bit wet after drying for 20 hours there. So all I want to say that it was really like a tropical rain storm.

Today I dod not do anything special, but not doing anything was really nice :) And I am still shocked by the fact that it is 23°C at 11 PM :D

Night 7-11 at the Mercator Telescope

These were the last nights at the telescope, but let me just pick the most important memories from these days, because I completely lost track of time by the end of the observing run. First of all, about the weather: we had only one night, when I did not have to keep one eye on the satellite picture or the full-sky webcam of the nearby Liverpool telescope, but at least we could open the dome on every night (though the last one was again quite crappy). I am very happy that the students were here, because after three weeks in the night rhythm, I got a “bit” tired, and I really needed company, to stay in a good mood. There were obvious signs, that my biological clock stared to break down. First of all, on Thursday we had a visit to the largest single optical telescope of the world, the GRANTECAN, but I did not manage to get up at 4 PM after a very long night, so I missed it… Then some days later (on Saturday), I slept over (this way sleeping 11 hours) and missed dinner (so no warm food that day…), so I had to ride up to the telescope in the moonlight, under the Milky Way (which was – beyond any question – extremely cool). Luckily this did not result in lost observing time, as the students and the teachers were up already. (Yeah, normally I was the first up at the telescope around 7:30 PM, and I was the last to leave at 9:30 AM…) I am sure that knowing that they were around gave a false secure feeling to my subconscious, because I know if I had been alone, this would have never happened. On Friday, we visited the 2.56 meter Nordic Optical Telescope – see the video below. The size of the dome is extremely small for such an instrument (I think the 1 meter RCC telescope in Hungary has a larger dome)… And the whole building rotates, not just the dome ;)

In the second half of the night, when the humidity was again too high to continue with the observations, I held a quite long stargazing session with the “small” Dobson-telescope to the students (and the teachers also ;D). We saw the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, the Orion nebula (which was really like on the pictures), Jupiter with its dark band and the shadow of Io, etc.

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Then on the morning we went to watch the sunrise, and the clouds moving low across the ridge of the caldera (where I sat hundreds of meters above nothing – thanks to Lena for the picture). We spent there at least one hour, as it was truly spectacular. We could even see our own shadows on the clouds, then – while riding down to the residencia – a full rainbow circle too :)

Then Saturday night was perfectly clear, but I was so tired, that although I finally had time (as I did not have to check the clouds every 5 minutes, and the students were able to observe without my help most of the time by the end of their stay), I could not work on my paper at all… :( But at least I managed to finish processing the pictures from my spring observing run (so they will be on my flickr gallery as soon as I manage to get a proper internet connection – as there is something wrong with the web these days here…). Before sunrise, I went out to walk a bit under the perfectly dark sky filled with thousands of stars (something you do not have in Belgium), and as soon as my eyes got used to the darkness, I realised that the triangle of the zodiacal light is perfectly visible above the eastern horizon! This was the second time that I have seen it in my whole life, but this was the first time that I managed to take a proper photo of it :) (The lights in the distance are cities and villages on Tenerife!) Then on the morning, there were absolutely no clouds down above the see, so we could see the shadow of the mountain on the see itself – also for the first time. And I had the fastest downhill ride of my stay ;D (Faster than the students with the car…)

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The last night was just long and tiring, with lots of high clouds, and almost no observations made. I am happy that I can switch back to the normal day-rhythm now, because I barely saw the Sun in the last three and a half weeks, and I am extremely tired now (so I really do not understand how did I manage to break my record riding up to the observatory after dinner – maybe the students passing me while waving and horning from the car helped :D).

So this is the end of my observing runs on the Canaries, and although it was much more tiring than my spring run on Mercator (hence I am much more exhausted at this point – so writing in English is not that easy anymore), I am still an observer, and I will be happy to take another observing run next spring, or as soon as I can after the winter is gone. But now I really start to miss things from Belgium; the colleagues and friends, the chocolate, proper fries (!!!), good brown beer, my studio (it is going to be so cold when I arrive home), the flat cycling route along the Dijlekanaal, just the streets and atmosphere of Leuven, and so on. So it will be good to be back. But now I will have some holidays at see level first, which I will use to rest and cycle (I do not know yet how am I going to do these two things together, but we will see). And I MUST spend some time on my paper (still the comments of the co-authors) in the next 36 hours, because I want it to be finished before I take the taxi down to Santa Cruz, to save myself from the stress… Honestly, I thought it would be finished by now, but I had much less energy in the last week than needed (and originally expected). But first of all, I have to sleep. A lot.

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Night 4-6 at the Mercator Telescope

I finished 10 minutes before the start of the twilight on night 3, so as I had no targets which could have been observed in such a short time, I decided to turn the telescope towards something visually stunning to create a proper outreach (PR) picture for our Institute, and the Mercator Telescope. The result is shown below :) The idea that we should release something like this once every month is supported by the staff at the telescope too, so that’s the reason why I made such a labelled version.

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My last lonely night turned out to be much more busy than planned, as the students from Leuven and Amsterdam were already at the observatory that evening. So while I was observing, they had their project presentations in the control room, which in one hand was quite interesting, but on the other hand, I could not work on my article… (I have to admit I have serious problems concentrating on it here.) The night itself was not the best, we had a lot of cirrus clouds (creating an amazing sunset – see below), and the seeing was also not that good. Then I had to close the dome for the last hours, because the clouds came up again… Even with far from optimal conditions, I managed to observe almost all the targets of the program, so it is OK.

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The first night of the students brought the worst weather I have ever seen until now on La Palma, as it was raining all night long. Luckily we got an invitation to visit the William Herschel Telescope, so after they got an introduction into image processing with IRAF, we left Mercator, and walked to the nearby WHT. Yeah, walking was my idea, as it was not raining at all, and the distance is only 400 meter. (Of course, on the way back it was raining, so we got completely soaked, but it was “fun”…)

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The WHT is really huge (for scale, look at the monitor in the bottom right corner), it has a mirror diameter of 4.2 meters. Mercator feels a bit smaller since we saw this :S We got a short introduction to the research done with the WHT, and a tour around the telescope itself. We even got a chance to take pictures of ourselves in the main mirror :) It was really impressive. The clouds and I stayed until sunrise (the students went down to sleep at around 3 AM), too bad that I am only productive in the last hour of the night. I guess this messed up day/night rhythm is not really good on a long term… Anyway, I still love observing.

Tonight we have good weather, so the students can finally work according to their projects, but I need to help them with the system and to give advice about exposure times, etc. It is almost continuous supervising. So the progress of my work will not be fast… But at least no one can say now that I am not taking my part from the teaching duties. Honestly, I like the role of the support astronomer very much :)

Night 0-3 at the Mercator Telescope

Yes, starting with night zero, as I had to be at the telescope already 24 hours earlier than planned, because the previous observer had to switch between instruments (which was not foreseen), so I was asked to join and help her. (I think I could be a really good support astronomer :D) The weather was really bad, we had to close after two hours, as the clouds came higher, and the Mercator building submerged in the layer of 100% humidity. But as that day we were with a car, I managed to transport all the clothes and other things up to the Observatory, which I need up here while I am observing. This is very useful, because this way, I can just ride up with my bike in cycling clothes (carrying only a small backpack for the daily – I mean nightly – food portion), then change to normal clothes on the top of the mountain, turn on the heaters, and start working in a quite cosy environment. (I have to admit it is a bit lonely sometimes, but the sunset and the sunrise, and the night sky definitely worth it.)

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My first real night was also crappy, a constant fight with the cloud layer (seen just a bit below the Telescope on the picture above), but at least I got some hours in the second part, when I could work with the telescope. Then I rode down in clouds on the morning. I have no time for anything else than breakfast, sleeping, and dinner down at the Residencia, as I usually sleep from 9 AM to 5 PM. The start of the third night was the worst, I rode up in heavy rain and quite strong wind, but I had to go, because I knew that it would clear up later. But the picture below gives you an impression about the weather at sunset… (FYI, the Sun should be in the middle of the photograph.)

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Yep. It was bad. Luckily my cycling clothes are quite water resistant, but it took at least a half night to dry them out in front of the radiators. But at least my bike is completely clean now :) Anyway, in the second half, it cleared out again (humidity dropped from 100% to 13% in less than one hour), so I could start working, but the wind was still quite strong, so I had to keep one eye on the screens (there are 14 of those up here) all the time. Don’t you think, that observing is easy! One has to take into account all the special requests (about timing, duration, etc.) when scheduling the targets for the night, then if the weather changes, the observer might need to reschedule everything, or build a completely new plan from scratch. There are a lot of variables affecting the timeline of the night. So it is not just sitting here and supervising the computers while they work. Not at all. It requires a lot of concentration, and it is tiring. (I am not complaining, just telling facts.) For example, think of the following: the night itself is 10 hours long, plus 1-1 hour before and after for calibrations and procedures (opening and closing the dome, setting up the system, etc.), and if there is a problem, this can be even more. So strictly speaking it is minimum 12 hours of work, and then you need time to eat, take a shower, and sleep. And voilà, a day is gone.

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Now (on the third official night) the weather is good, the sky is clear, the wind speed and the humidity is low, so life is much easier. (BTW this was the first evening, that I rode up in sunshine, and not thick clouds and/or rain.) But besides observing, I should work on my article too (as my co-authors comments are eagerly waiting to be implemented), which is much harder here than I thought it would be. I need to improve my multitasking abilities… So, let’s do it. (The crescent Moon and Venus hanging low on the horizon next to the dome of the William Herschel Telescope.)

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